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Beyond the Bright Lights

By Imagining America | September 15, 2016

By Heather Radke, an M.F.A. candidate in Nonfiction at Columbia University and a 2016–2017 Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellow. This PAGE Blog Salon explores themes of intersectionality and public scholarship, important topics of the upcoming Imagining America national conference, Oct. 6-8, 2016, in Milwaukee, WI.

During my time working as a curator at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago, the staff often talked about measuring success outside of the usual metrics. Instead of asking how many people attended a public program, we would ask if there were multiple perspectives in the room. Instead of asking if visitors learned the names and dates of the Progressive Era, we asked how the museum made visitors feel and how it inspired visitors to action.

Now, I am a full-time student and writer in an MFA program, and the notion of “success” is inescapable. There is always a rumor circulating of a book deal about to be made, a movie option for a novel around the corner, an article about to be published in The Paris Review. It is the stuff of green-eyed nightmares. It is also a definition of success that emanates from a highly individualistic understanding of art.

As I seek to measure the success of my own writing, and the work I do in literary and scholarly communities, I have tried again and again to return to an approach centered in my values as a community-engaged artist and cultural activist. Rather than focus on the number of online page views, getting the most prestigious writers to contribute to the Columbia Journal, or landing the fanciest agent, I try to ask other questions. How can my writing engage multiple publics? How do I make sure readings are interesting and relevant for diverse audiences? How do I teach in a way that opens up conversations about race, class, and gender? How do I question my notions of what constitutes “good writing” to take into account the fraught history of the literary canon as a space dominated by white men?

Of course, I cannot help but crave the bright lights of literary stardom. But alongside those Byronic capitalist fantasies, I try to actively redefine success for myself, my students, and my colleagues to include the ethic of a publicly engaged artistic practice.

Comments

Heather-
Reading of your obvious love of writing and all of the bases you attempt to cover –(diverse audience, community/activist race, class and gender) with it sounds exhausting. As to what entails a fraught history I’m not sure but it may have something to do with the old marketplace. I can only judge a work of art whatever the medium by its own merit as well as how I do or do not respond to it.
M Christiansen

Heather, as a fellow creative writer, I cannot tell you how much this post hit home for me. It can feel impossible to simultaneously create radical work, advocate for your art, and stay in touch with the most pressing aspects of being an active member of the creative writing community (keeping things politically conscious, however you can). So often we fall into this fugue state of desperation about visibility and success. Even those of us who largely feel grounded and privilege creative production as a platform for our political ideas lose that certainty. I know I have been guilty of this loss of focus more than once, and I’m sure I will again. Those in our creative writing programs, circles, departments, etc. can exasperate this impulse, depending.

It’s a hard balance to strike, particularly when we are operating in a white racist ableist heteropatriarchy—one that will largely work against our input and success. The lack of interest in our hard labor can provoke a feeling of frustration at best and demoralization at worst. In any event, I love the questions you are asking and the approach you are taking in the face of all this. It’s a thoughtful reminder to keep our eyes where they should be: on the work, on the students, the readers woefully underrepresented the literary canon.

Heather,
Your desire and goal to create an ethic of “publicly engaged artistic practice” is sometimes beyond the measure of the academe. The questions you pose highlight the major disconnect between the professional (and what counts as “professional”) and the responsibilities of public scholars. It is also interesting to hear a closing theme of value (capital vs public scholarship), where sometimes one doesn’t translate into another. Nevertheless, the very fact that you are deeply thinking about the rigors of being a bridge between dialogues and spheres already makes you and your praxis a challenge to staid notions of the academe.